


chance encounters

by powerandpathos



Series: the sculptor [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - Student/Teacher, Alternative Universe - Rome, Collab, M/M, Sculptor Lotor, art student lance, this is so gratuitous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 13:25:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14916189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powerandpathos/pseuds/powerandpathos
Summary: Lance gets a helping hand in an art store in Rome.





	chance encounters

**Author's Note:**

> Consider this a semi-prologue to an artist!au fic [uneballe-unmort](http://uneballe-unmort.tumblr.com/) and I have had in the works for the best part of a year, and see her beautiful concept art [here.](http://uneballe-unmort.tumblr.com/tagged/artist%21au)
> 
> [Originally posted on Tumblr.](https://agapaic.tumblr.com/post/174831630471/fic-chance-encounters)

Lance meets him for the first time in an art store three streets away from the Tiber. The walls are terracotta and the shelves are floor-to-ceiling and made of wood bent from years of use, and he’s blond and marvelous and Lance thinks he’s fallen.

The struggle comes first—the meeting after. He learns later that the struggle was observed and noted, and perhaps, he thinks later, it was all in his favour. The meeting, too.

The struggle is this: the store is small and Lance’s list is huge.

The battle grows inside him for a while before he has to concede to needing help. Spanish, he knows well and can let run off his tongue like a river bursting its banks. Italian comes instead like a leaking faucet, stop-start and quavering. Arrogantly, he thought he would get by with a couple after-school classes, a scant few conversations with an Italian kid in their freshman year, and four hours of Duolingo on the plane.

He learns how to order food and make hazy remarks about the weather. He doesn’t learn how to ask where the vine charcoal is kept or what acrylic pigment they’d recommend. Most of it is easy: a new sketchbook to replace one he filled at the airport, a set of gouache paints that are begging him to spend his poor student’s allowance on, and a few tubes of cadmium acrylics because Rome was _yellows_ : sun-dyed fountains and narrow alleyways and yellowing cobblestones and ochre manor houses on the Hills and monuments lit up at night against blue-black skies.

 _A city of sepia_ , Lance thought, hot air on his face through the taxi’s window en route to his apartment.

Lance combs the aisles now, arms heavy with supplies, stomach grumbling. He’d been up before dawn for the sunrise, perched on the balcony with a canvas Hunk had lent him. Evenings were cool, days stifling and hot. The city glowed in the mornings, unshuttered windows gleaming like a goldsmith’s cast, the river opulent and glittering, sunlight soaking the waking streets. Rome was an aching beauty Lance hadn’t been prepared for.

‘Rome?’ he’d been asked. And then: ‘You won’t know the place until you can breathe it.’

It was in the air to begin with, like pollen scratching in his throat, a woman’s perfume on the stretch of a wrist, the carried scent of a florist’s open window. Lance’s lungs aren’t full yet.

The store here smells of oil paints and heady turpentine, pine canvas frames and ashy charcoal, wood varnish and chalk dust, Conté and the vapour of hot glue, the dampness of sugar paper and bitterness of linseed oil. Lance’s fingers itch for a sketchbook, a palette of acrylic, the watercolour pencils in his rucksack.

He urges himself to focus, and takes another look at his list.

He received it via email a week before his flight. The class requirements are reasonable, but Lance still wants to wince. He packed a week’s supply of clothes and three month’s of art supplies, and there are still tools his professor has requested him to buy. Barely a week in and a good chunk of his savings are already gone, long nights spent back in his brother’s Varadero autoshop that seem wasted now.

He’s looking for a chalk pencil when he hears the shop door open. It’s a warm Wednesday morning, the store empty, sunlight streaming through dusty front windows, but the new arrival brings with it an animated response from the cashier like an ‘ON’ button has been pressed. Lance is far back in the store, overhead lights dim and few, backed up by books on Renaissance architecture, Bartolini, palette knife techniques, and human anatomy. He’s eyeing an impressionism-versus-modernism text when he hears the answering voice.

It’s low and male and liquid, and Lance’s ear isn’t good enough to pick up any words. The glimpse Lance gets through a shelf of coloured card is alien—a wrinkled, cotton skin rolled up at the elbows, a show of tanned, vascular forearms, and then his hair. White-blond and startling. Real enough to be unnatural, unnatural enough to be fake, tapering at the waist in a fishtail plait.

Lance edges closer for a look, breath held, while the customer and cashier participate in eager discussion. They’re oblivious to his watching. Closer, more attentive, he catches a few words— _school, Florence, exhibition_. The rest blend together too muffled for his ear to snare, too rapid for his mind to translate.

By the time Lance has grabbed his bag from against a yellowing, second-hand book pile and weaved his way to the front of the store, the man has gone.

Lance feels a pang of disappointment.

The cashier is an aging woman in her fifties, grey hair cut close enough to show the shape of her skull, striking peacock feathers dangling from low lobes. She greets Lance with a good morning and _Tutto ok?_ and Lance finds himself immediately brought up against a barrier.

‘Uh,’ he says, trying to loosen his tongue, which now feels heavy and immovable in his mouth. ‘ _Tutto benne… Ma non ho un…_ ’

The woman stares at him, and blinks once.

This is where the struggle begins. His phone is already dead, battery wasted on photos of steam rising of the Tiber as the sun rose, and he’s pretty sure his mother’s battered 1980’s Italian phrasebook won’t cover _chalk pencil_.

The cashier picks up a tablet lying beside the register. _‘Vuoi tradurre?’_ she asks him. Lance takes the tablet, embarrassingly grateful, and opens up the web browser.

‘Don’t bother with that,’ comes a voice as Lance is navigating to Google Translate. ‘You’ll never find what you’re looking for.’

It takes a second for Lance to realise that the voice is in English, clipped and British, something else muddled in there too. It takes another five for him to register the face: pointed, devastatingly aristocratic, some masculine Mondragone brought to life, an Apollo without the rounded cheeks, a Corti _Lucifer_ without the wings, unbearably humanised, and yet barely human at all.

‘What is it you need? I’ll translate.’

 _We have the same eyes,_ Lance thinks.

‘You do speak English, don’t you?’

It’s the same again, but now it feels like he has no tongue: empty mouth, empty mind, empty lungs.

He breathes in Rome.

‘Yeah. Sorry. You scared me.’

The man looks him up and down. ‘Sorry. I was under the impression you saw me from over there.’ A gesture towards the back of the store. Embarrassment draws blood to Lance’s face, and suddenly the sun is hotter and brighter and the supplies in Lance’s buckling arms are threatening to fall on the floor. ‘Do you need books?’

‘Supplies,’ Lance says. ‘Chalk pencil. Vine charcoal. Watercolour sketchbook in A4.’

The man arches a pale brow, then turns to the cashier. His translation is almost seamless; he pauses where Lance had, lists only three things. But then there’s a comment Lance doesn’t catch, and he wants to flush harder when the peacock lady tilts her head at him, considering.

 _‘Pensi usi gli acquerelli?’_ she says, saying something about watercolours. _‘Sembrerebbe il tipo._ ’

 _‘Già_ , _probabile,’_ the man replies. He looks back at Lance, who’s tugging at a wisp of cotton unravelling from the pocket of his jean shorts. ‘Leave your things on the counter and follow me. I’ll show you to what you need.’

Lance follows, and stares at the broad width of the man’s shoulders, the fit of his grey chinos, the wandering flicker of his fingertips as they trail along shelves like a knowing, familiar caress of lover greeting lover. _Hello, sweetheart._ Lance’s eyes linger on the inside of the man’s wrist, the small patch of grey matter clinging to his artery.

Clay.

‘You’re a sculptor?’ Lance blurts out, and the image fashions itself in his mind with rapid ease: the swift brush strokes of his usual style in neutral acrylic, ordained to the shape of an artist at work, hair plaited to his waist, bare skin layered in his own medium, building a self-image, life-size, with his own hands. _The Sculptor._ Creator or created?

The Sculptor glances over his shoulder. ‘You know more Italian than you let on.’

Lance points a finger. ‘The clay on your wrist. And behind your ear. It would be rude of me to pretend not to speak a language.’ _Rude to talk about someone in another language in front of them, too._

If the man catches the intention behind Lance’s words, he shows no outward sign of embarrassment—or remorse. Lance is trying to remember seeing a single glimmer of expression on the man’s face. Even with the woman—someone he seemed close with, familial, even—there had been nothing.

‘You’re observant,’ he tells Lance.

‘Maybe you’re just messy.’

A quiet snort. The quirk of a lips. It’s something. ‘Maybe. Try sculpting life-size and then tell me that.’

Lance doesn’t. ‘D’you work here?’ he asks instead.

‘I’m freelance. My studio is a short walk away.’

‘Studio,’ Lance says, impressed. ‘What are you working on?’

He stops so suddenly that Lance nearly walks into him, and the toe of Lance’s sneakers kick into the back of his ankles.

‘You ask an awful lot of questions,’ he says, before Lance can apologise, barely ruffled by the contact. He gestures at the shelving. ‘Your chalk pencils.’

The choice is limited, and the variation in price even more so. Lance reaches out—

‘Not that one,’ the man says. Lance looks down. The Sculptor’s cool fingers are curled around Lance’s wrist. He moves Lance’s hand slightly to the right, a marionette without strings, and the touch is so light it barely exists. ‘You’ll want this one.’

‘Right,’ Lance says, keeping his voice level. ‘Sure.’

Chalk pencil nearly breaking in half in his clenched fist, he follows The Sculptor again to the vine charcoal. It’s near the books; Lance must have passed it twice already during his own trailing. He glances between the three boxes of charcoal, bunched twists of coal like rush plants, reaches out—

It happens again.

‘This one.’

Lance turns on him, irritation mixing inside him with something heady. ‘Are you going to correct every choice I make _just_ so you get to touch me?’

Lance’s voice had been too loud; the natural silence of the art store turns awkward.

The Sculptor blinks at Lance. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and sounds genuine. ‘I use my hands so often with clay, it’s… I forget that people can’t be moved like that sometimes.’ He shrugs affably, spreads his hands, a humbling facade. ‘If I’m honest, I’ve been working on my piece so long I don’t remember the last time I touched anyone.’

Lance’s fingers press absently at his wrist. The touches weren’t heavy enough to leave a mark—weren’t heavy enough for Lance to be sure either one had been real—and the words replay in his head. _I don’t remember the last time I touched anyone._ So innocent, so expressionless that the slight quaver between The Sculptor’s pale brows transforms his whole being into a tortured one. The starving artist, left to ache. Lance doesn’t know what context The Sculptor meant it in. He hopes his guess is the right one. Hopes, desperately, that it isn’t.

 _You don’t need to be that honest,_ he could say.

Instead: ‘People can be. Moved. Like that.’ Lance clenches his jaw. ‘But, really, _permission._ It’s a thing, and it’s appreciated.’

The Sculptor inclines his head. ‘Understood. But take my advice: I’ve been to half the art stores in Rome, and I’ve been coming here for three years. The quality is unrivalled. I know the products. Their clay suppliers are over four hundred years old.’

‘Must be well-known,’ Lance says. He tugs out his supply list from his pocket. ‘My professor told me to get everything from here too.’

‘Professor?’

‘Art major,’ Lance explains. ‘Summer intensive programme. On _scholarship_ ,’ he adds proudly. ‘I have a project due on the first day. Rome’s cityscape in any medium.’

‘I see. The _Colosseo_ and _Fora Romano_ in watercolours?’

Lance looks at him shrewdly. ‘I can’t tell if I’m insulted, but I was thinking December’s starling migration over the Tiber. Charcoal.’

The Sculptor raises a brow again, and rests his spine against high-stacked trays of monochrome pastels. They’re secluded here, dust specks like fireflies, and the shelving is barely shoulder-width apart. It’s first-date material, nosing into the nooks and crannies of old art stores and second-hand book shops. Brunch in Trastevere, a sun-shaded stroll up to the Capitoline, _merenda_ in the nearest piazza, sunset and a bottle of white from the Gianicolo. The fantasy unravels easily in Lance’s mind, a ball of wool rolling across tilted floorboards he has to let unwind. He can almost taste it—the crisp wine, sunblushed tomatoes on bruschetta, pink lips. The words play again and again in his head. _I don’t remember the last time…_

Lance knows why they echo. He doesn’t remember the last time, either. His freshman year of art school? Summer vacation back in Varadero between sophomore and junior year? Between school and oil paint smudges and late nights at the campus bar and later nights at a canvas, curled over a sketchbook, cramped at his dorm desk, Lance doesn’t remember the last time his body bent itself in any way for another person but for art.

‘It’s hard to catch movement in charcoal,’ The Sculptor says. ‘Especially if you’re unused to it.’

Lance reigns his attention in. He lifts his chin slightly. ‘I think I can handle it,’ Lance says, spinning the chalk pencil between his fingers.

Blue eyes meet his own, a half challenge when he asks Lance: ‘Do you speak from experience?’

The chalk pencil stops, and Lance holds it still in his palm. ‘I like to try new things,’ he replies, and feels the build of something. It feels like a word on the tip of his tongue, or an image he can only realise in his head once its on paper. It feels dangerous—too dangerous to let linger. He clears his throat, points down the store’s aisles with the box of vine charcoal. ‘Watercolour sketchbook?’

‘Follow me.’

Lance does.

They find the sketchbooks near the windows, only three left, stacked under packs of loose watercolour paper and an overhanging roll of brown craft paper.

‘Sometimes you have to do a little digging,’ The Sculptor tells Lance, an odd look of mischief in his eyes as he kneels on the shop floor, the boyish pleasure of treasure unburied where ‘x’ marks the spot. Lance watches as he tugs a sketchbook out from beneath the stacks and blows the dust off its cover, inspecting it. There’s a small circle of dirt on his suit pants when he stands, brushed off with a hand, and he hands the sketchbook to Lance.

He says, ‘Yours, I believe.’

Lance takes it, and looks at The Sculptor’s hands, wondering what they’ve created, and says, ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’

There’s a silence short as a blink.

‘Excuse me?’

Lance winces, stumbles over the rest of his words like tripping over bracken on a forest floor. ‘Or wine. Whatever you want, really. I just figured… with you helping me with all this—the translating, the supplies… I’d like to thank you.’

A blond strand of hair has escaped The Sculptor’s plait, and Lance watches him tuck it behind his ear, a bizarrely youthful gesture, some vulnerability exposed that Lance doesn’t feel qualified to have seen. He can’t make out The Sculptor’s expression, eyes downcast, the apostrophe at the bridge of his nose returned. Lance can’t help the way he feels himself looking at the man: hungered and awed, like taking in a museum piece. The urge to touch, having to settle for looking with starving eyes.

‘That’s… a decent gesture of you,’ The Sculptor makes out eventually. ‘Really. But I seem to have given you the wrong sort of impression.’

Lance straightens. He says, ‘If you’re not into guys I’m gonna eat the damned charcoal soon as I buy it.’

The Sculptor chuckles. Rainwater on copper pipes, low like a pebble dropped in a well ten feet deep. Lance wants to climb down after it, cuts and bruises welcome, and hold it in his palms.

‘It’s not an issue of sexuality,’ is all The Sculptor says, neither confirmation nor denial. His eyes flick to Lance’s face, dart across the panes of his face, the ‘v’ of his neckline. ‘There are other matters to consider.’ The Sculptor inclines his head, some token gesture of tinged, soft-mouthed regret. ‘Unfortunately.’

‘Yeah?’ Lance asks. ‘Like what?’

The Sculptor just looks at him. ‘You should pay.’ He angles his head towards the front counter. ‘Rosa will think I’ve carried you off to have my way with you amongst the easels.’

Lance’s pulse thuds in his throat. ‘Why would she think that?’ he asks, playing along.

‘How should I know?’ The Sculptor lies easily.

Lance wanders after him to the register, helpless to do anything but follow. He imagines Hunk seeing him now, the exhaustion that would settle into him, Lance’s fancies like fleeting whirlwinds, like a swarm of locusts shredding everything in its path, suffocating and entire—easy to lose oneself in and never come out.

Lance knows he’ll pull himself out of this one by the end of the day. A few beers back at the apartment and a pizza from the restaurant below them and it’ll be done. A drunken haze of indulgence, a wetted palm, and it’ll be over. A blush of fondness to look back on by the end of summer. Lance lets himself accept that truth now, wears it around his shoulders, a weight of resignation.

At the counter, Rosa has her eyes narrowed on The Sculptor, disapproval set into the lines of her hawkish features.

 _‘È tutto?’_ she asks Lance, drawing her eyes away from the man at Lance’s side. The Sculptor has an elbow resting on the counter, quizzical smile toying at the edge of his mouth, the relaxed posture of someone ready to be exacted into art—someone used to being looked at.

‘ _Sí_ ,’ Lance replies. _‘Grazie_. _’_ He looks at the Sculptor. ‘Thank you. Again. You’re… sure about that coffee?’

‘Very sure. There’ll be plenty of time in the future.’

Lance tilts his head, confused. ‘We’ll be lucky to catch each other here again.’

The Sculptor smiles. ‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you in class, Lance.’ To Rosa, he nods. _‘Ciao, Rosa.’_

The store owner makes a disapproving, shooing gesture. _‘Vattene, Lotor.’_

Lotor laughs as he walks out the art store, the sound chiming with the doorbell, good-spirited and wonderfully wicked. It freezes Lance in his place, halfway to tugging out his wallet, and every moment from the past hour runs in his head like tickertape, faster and faster with every second until it’s a montage blur of disastrous events. The flirtation, the coffee invitation, the open worship of Lotor’s features that feels adulterous now.

 _The Sculptor_ , he’d called him in his head, stupidly and terrifyingly naively, some nameless beauty Lance was eager to forget by sunset. A foreign Michelangelo Lance thought he would never see again. Hoped, almost, to save himself the embarrassment of his own fawning—his own crush that would develop too rapidly by summer’s end. A few subsequent chance encounters in the art store, a coincidental stroll through the Piazza Farnese, Lance’s accidental discovery of the man’s studio. Personal fantasy would have urged it along with a rapid, awful descent.

But there will be nothing accidental about this. Their meetings now will be orchestrated and scheduled and _graded_. Lance feels degraded, and humiliation streaks blood through his cheeks and blooms across his torso.

 _Lotor_ , he hears, again and again as Rosa presses away a look of regretful pity.

Lotor Daibazaal. Graduate of Lance’s college with one of the highest grades ever achieved. Perfector of his work with a dedication that had made Lance ache with envy for years. Creator of a beauty that was painful in its realism. Founder of the coveted Daibazaal Summer Programme in his studio in Rome, an offer synonymous with future success.

And Lance’s teacher for the next three months.

The agony of the revelation was exquisite, and Lance could only wonder how beautifully Lotor would be able to capture Lance’s realisation in marble.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos/comments/[reblog the fic on Tumblr](https://agapaic.tumblr.com/post/174831630471/fic-chance-encounters).
> 
> Huge thank you to mondoboia on Tumblr who helped me out with my Italian phrasing, and to akumamomo and bowldeepfannish who also offered their help!
> 
>  
> 
> [Find me on Tumblr.](http://agapaic.tumblr.com)


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